Book review: the colonel who would not repent: the bangladesh war and its unquiet legacy by Salil Tripathi

In The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy, journalist Salil Tripathi revisits Bangladesh’s liberation war. As a young journalist, Tripathi encountered Farooq Rahman, the unrepentant colonel who played a pivotal role in the assassination of Bangladesh’s revered independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, but who was granted indemnity in the immediate aftermath. Farooq Rahman lived freely in Dhaka, even running for president, before his eventual execution by a war crimes tribunal in 2010. How, asks Tripathi, could Bangladesh’s independence leader be revered while his killers walked free? Why did it take so long to establish a war crimes tribunal? And how might Bangladesh ‘put its blood-soaked past behind without condoning the guilty’? Review by Paul Gilbert.